What is the difference between a screed and a lament? A manifesto and a prayer? In the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is standing trial in the Boston Marathon bombings, it is all in the reading.
During testimony last week, the defence cross-examined an FBI agent about the Twitter account Tsarnaev kept. In the sincere reading of Special Agent Steven Kimball, the tweets painted a portrait of a young Muslim who quoted al-Qaida and who was in the process of self-radicalisation. During cross-examination, however, public defender Miriam Conrad pointed out that the sinister-sounding tweets (including one that said, in Russian, "I shall die young") were a hodgepodge of quotes from popular songs and television shows - which made them consistent with the rest of Tsarnaev's Twitter life, dedicated to girls, burgers and sleep habits.
Aside from a few tweets, Tsarnaev is known to have made only two statements after the marathon bombing, both in writing: his responses to law enforcement questions written while he was in the hospital, in pain and under sedation (he had a tracheal tube, so he could not speak), and the note he penciled on the sides of a dry-docked boat in Watertown, Massachusetts, where he hid for hours after his older brother, Tamerlan, had been killed.
The note from the boat was released to the public in parts over the past year and a half, and Tsarnaev's indictment included citations from it that the prosecution likely continues to see as the most damning: "The U.S. Government is killing our innocent civilians"; " I can't stand to see such evil go unpunished"; "we Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all"; "Now I don't like killing innocent people it is forbidden in Islam but due to said [unintelligible] it is allowed"; and "Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop."
